Blasts from the past

June 6, 2025

Can history repeat itself, and is it happening these days in front of our eyes?

Without a shadow of a doubt, the answer is in the affirmative.

Can we avoid making the same mistakes in response?

Yes, but only if we are prepared to change course and act proactively.

A first step is recognising that there are indeed problems threatening us personally as Jews and collectively as communities in the Diaspora. This needs to replace any sort of denial that there is any problem. Wishful thinking that “things will blow over” given time and a low profile needs to be abandoned as quickly as possible.

Finally, whether one likes it or not, solidarity with Israel must be paramount. This does not mean blind agreement with all policies and actions. It does, however, require an unqualified affirmation that a restored Jewish sovereignty is not only legitimate but also historically mandated.

The inevitable by-product of slogans articulated daily, such as “globalise the intifada” and “from the river to the sea”, can now be seen in an increasing number of countries. An endless stream of ill-informed invective issuing forth from political leaders is culminating in a mass demonisation of Israel. Actual facts are ignored in the race to embrace the web of lies spun by Hamas and their willing accomplices.

In a direct blast from the past, Israel and Jews are tarred with the most outrageous accusations. The mud sticks even when it is proven that claims of genocide and mass murder are figments of deliberate disinformation. As in the past, no amount of logic and rebuttal can undo the damage already caused. Those infected with the Jew hate virus are beyond any sort of redemption.

The common denominator, whether past or current, is that the murder or attempted murder of Jews is always preceded by inflammatory rhetoric and incitement.

It makes no difference if the lies emanate from individuals or groups; the end result is always the same. Physical attacks are the inevitable corollary as can be witnessed on all continents. Once the genie of hate is unleashed, it is impossible to contain.

Ritualistic expressions of horror recycled after each physical assault and act of vandalism are worthless and merely window dressing designed to lull gullible Jews into believing that something is being done.

More often than not, one can predict likely events that are bound to occur. The signs and omens are clearly indicated.

A German Jewish student leader admitted that “antisemitic hate is part of our daily lives.”

The German Chancellor claims that Israel is no longer “justified” in its Gaza campaign. Presumably, this means that Hamas is entirely justified in still holding kidnapped Israelis.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that Jewish students are under attack and Jews in Germany are once again afraid to be identified with life becoming reminiscent of pre-World War conditions?

Macron of France pretends to be a “friend.” He presides over a country that is rapidly becoming a host to groups hostile to fraternity, equality, and liberty. Riots and vandalism against Jewish buildings, as well as violence, murder and mayhem, are now a normal part of French Jewish life. Macron’s embrace of the murderous “Palestinian” cause is another indicator of what Jews in that country can expect in the days ahead.

A commentator mentioned that he needs a slap of reality. Apart from his wife, it seems that nobody else is willing to do so.

France has decided to posthumously promote Alfred Dreyfus one hundred and thirty years after he was cashiered from the army. That sums up how seriously French Governments tackle Jew hate.

A recent survey in the United Kingdom found that over 80% of British Jews are afraid to display their identity. The UK Labour Government is now pandering to the anti-Israel wing of the party. Daily pontifications by the PM and Foreign Secretary, fuelled by a hostile media, contribute to the most toxic atmosphere experienced in years. Universities are hotbeds of hate, and a seething cauldron of violence lurks.

In a recent survey conducted by the European Jewish Association, 82% of Europeans do not view the fight against antisemitism as a policy priority.

In the USA, the results of jihadist indoctrination, gun violence, illegal infiltration and left-wing progressive anti-Israel demonisation can already be seen. Terror attacks are becoming common and, as elsewhere, are attaining uncontrollable levels.

The same pattern is discernible everywhere, including the antipodes, which once were havens of relative sanity and tolerance. Phil Goff, a former NZ Foreign Minister and High Commissioner to the UK (since sacked) proclaimed that “Israel doesn’t care how many innocent people it is killing.” His ignorant claims add fuel to the fire.

Did anyone notice a news item hidden away in an inside column that reported that Stalin is making a reappearance in Russia again? His resurrection takes the form of new statues and paintings appearing in various parts of the country. Hailed by many Russians as a saint and reviled by others as a murderer, his gradual return should be ringing loud warning bells for Jews.

An emerging alliance between Pakistan, Turkey and Iran should be raising red flags. Instead, it sinks from sight.

How long will it take for Jews in countries where they are already under constant threat or where the signs flash danger, to get the message?

Why do we always leave it too late and ignore the early warning messages?

Take the so-called “peace agreements” with Egypt and Jordan as examples of how easily one can be duped into believing that a new Middle East has been born.

Unlike the Abrahamic Accords, the relationship with Egypt and Jordan is cold and getting colder.

The Accords state: We support science, art, medicine, and commerce to inspire humankind, maximise human potential and bring nations closer together. We seek to end radicalisation and conflict to provide all children a better future. We pursue a vision of peace, security, and prosperity in the Middle East and around the world.

In direct contrast, no such ideals and objectives have motivated the treaties with Egypt and Jordan. Neither country has fostered and encouraged warm relationships. Apart from a lack of armed conflict and an occasional trade deal, any sort of people-to-people relationship and eradication of hate education is completely absent. Instead, there is an atmosphere of hostility. No vestige of tolerance of Israel, Zionism, Jews or Judaism is to be found.

Take Jordanian textbooks as an example of how the next generation is being radicalised.

An international study found that they justify the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led massacre, promote Jew hate and violent jihad. The text frames the destruction of “Israeli colonies” inhabited by “settlers” as a response to Israeli oppression, implicitly suggesting that the civilians who were attacked, murdered and kidnapped were legitimate targets.

The report also highlights that textbooks referencing Jews in Islamic history perpetuate harmful stereotypes, portraying deceit, treachery and hostility towards Islam as inherent characteristics of the Jewish People. A Grade 10 Islamic education textbook cited in the study teaches that jihad includes fighting enemies and defending the nation, with martyrdom presented as a religious ideal.

Concurrently, Jordanian textbooks largely omit mention of the landmark 1994 peace treaty with Israel. When referenced, it is often portrayed as a reluctant concession to the “Israeli occupation State.”

Jordan loves to convey the impression that it is the guardian of religious tolerance on the Temple Mount and has successfully sold the narrative that it alone safeguards Islamic holy sites in “occupied” Jerusalem.

The fact that most of the rest of the world has bought into this charade and continues to ignore blatant incitement highlights the failure of successive Israeli Governments and Diaspora Jewish leaders to expose these continuing scandals.

With both Egypt and Jordan promoting “Palestinian” statehood and continuing to inculcate hate in the next generation any sort of peace, security and tolerance is a mirage.

The blasts from the past will become ever more lethal unless we learn from the failures to confront danger in time.

Qatari PR Show in Washington to Focus on “Israel’s Destruction of Gaza” and “Genocide in Gaza”

Center for Near East Policy Research

June 6, 2025

What think tanks promote Qatar propaganda in Washington? The Arab Center Washington (ACW) and the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACRPS) in Doha, Qatar.
The ACRPS think tank is run by Azmi Bashara, a former member of the Israeli Knesset (1996-2007) and suspected Hizbullah spy against Israel, who fled Israel and is now ensconced in Qatari academia.
The Doha-affiliated organizations are funded by the Qatar Foundation, a multi-billion-dollar royal family initiative that links Qatar with American universities, Washington lobbyists, and the U.S. media.

The Arab Center Washington (ACW) touts itself as an “independent, nonpartisan research organization” dedicated to enhancing American “understanding of the Arab world and providing the Arab world with insights into policy formation in the United States.”

ACW was established in Doha, Qatar, in autumn 2010 with branches in Tunis, Washington, and Paris. Today, it is affiliated with the Qatari Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACRPS), an “independent social sciences and humanities institute” that employs “resident researchers and administrative staff, hosts visiting researchers, and offers sabbaticals to pursue academic research. Additionally, it appoints external researchers to conduct research projects.”

For all their claims of independence and non-partisanship, the Centers are cornerstones of the Qatari royal enterprises, led and funded by the Qatar Foundation.

Sheikha Moza in Turkey at a conference organized by the wife of President Erdogan. (*MEMRI*)

Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, one of the richest and most influential figures in Qatar, is the chairperson of the Qatar Foundation. The political message of the foundation was reflected in an antisemitic speech she delivered in Turkey in November 2023.¹

For decades, we have witnessed Israel spreading fabricated historical narratives, which were refuted by many historians, including Israeli ones. These narratives have taken over the world’s collective mind, and if someone dares to debate any Israeli narrative, he is cast aside, having been accused of antisemitism, which in itself is another problematic narrative. By ‘Semitism,’ they mean Jews, having taken a monopoly on the Semitic race, which they attribute to themselves, while denying [its application] to other nations, which speak Semitic languages, like the Arabs, the Assyrians, and the Chaldeans….

Everything we do for our brothers in Palestine, in Gaza, and in the West Bank is less than they deserve. At this point in history, they represent the honor of our nation, in a time of inferiority and determination. To the children of Palestine, I say: You were born men. With your steadfastness, you have proven how feeble and broken are the people whom we once thought to be men.

The Kangaroo Court Conference in Washington on June 11

These two Qatari-affiliated think tanks will be promoting the canards on “Israel’s Destruction of Gaza” and “Genocide in Gaza” at the National Press Club in Washington on June 11. The deck is stacked, and the lineup of speakers from nongovernment organizations and universities blessed with Qatari largesse will find Israel guilty on multiple counts of genocide.² According to the conference announcement:

Participants will explore dimensions of loss beyond physical casualties: cultural heritage erasure, educational disruption, and the unravelling of Gaza’s social fabric. How has Gaza’s healthcare been systematically destroyed, and what are the long-term public health impacts? What dimensions of loss extend beyond physical casualties? How do events in Gaza challenge conventional understandings of genocide? What accountability mechanisms exist for war crimes, and who must be held responsible under international humanitarian law?

At the conference’s second session, titled “Palestine after the Genocide,” attention will be turned to the Palestinians’ political future, with an apparent focus on U.S. policy.

The session provides a multidimensional analysis of potential futures for Palestine, addressing internal political dynamics, international relationships, regional reconfiguration, and the evolving role of global powers. How are Palestinian political structures transforming at this pivotal moment? What dynamics are shaping Hamas’s future role? How are global solidarity movements evolving? How have events since October 7th reconfigured Middle East alliances? What shifts in U.S. policy toward Palestine can be anticipated, and what are their implications?

Sheikha Moza (center with the gold necklace), her son the Emir, and foreign university representatives, recipients of Qatari largesse. “Leading institutions have established campuses and programs in Qatar – Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, Northwestern University in Qatar, Texas A&M University in Qatar, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, HEC Paris in Qatar, and University College London in Qatar.” (Qatar Foundation)

The Qatar Foundation and its ACW and ACRPS affiliates provide a steady stream of “experts” to editors, media, publications, and speaking occasions in the United States. U.S. Justice Department Foreign Agent records provide an example from October 2024. The following letter is on file:

As we approach the one-year anniversary of October 7th, the following Qatar Foundation experts are available to support your coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, Israel-Hizbullah conflict, and regional repercussions. All experts are based in Doha (GMT+3) and available for virtual interviews. Their institutions are part of Qatar Foundation’s Education City.

The experts listed in the Qatari documents include five professors from Georgetown University in Qatar and four from Northwestern University in Qatar, ready, willing, and able to discuss international law, media affairs, and international relations.³

Azmi Bishara, director of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and former Member of the Knesset, addresses students of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar. (Qatar.Georgetown.edu)

Bishara and the Emir of Qatar — Azmi Bishara, director of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and former Member of the Knesset, addresses students of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar. (Qatar.Georgetown.edu)

ACRPS and the Arab Center Washington, the Megaphones for Propaganda

As the name “Arab Center Washington” gives no clue to its Qatari sponsors, the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies publishes an annual survey called the “Arab Opinion Index.” The study, often cited in the Western media, doesn’t reveal its parentage. An example: the Washington Post published an article in October 2020, “What do ordinary Arabs think about normalizing relations with Israel? Our research suggests many oppose normalization but may be reluctant to say so,” by Dana El Kurd. The polling data of the Arab Opinion Index from “28,300 people in 13 countries, suggests that many Arabs are at odds with their governments on the question of Israel. The vast majority of Arabs probably oppose normalization [italicization added].” Strange language – probably and suggests – for a scientific study. What’s stranger is El Kurd’s narrative, “The UAE and Bahrain are among the most repressive governments in the Middle East. The UAE and Bahrain were not included in our survey, but we can get a sense of public opinion from how civil society reacted to the news of normalization.”

Scratch the surface, and the survey is not so strange. The Arab Opinion Index is a product of the Qatari-based ACRPS; El Kurd teaches at the Doha (Qatar) Institute for Graduate Studies. Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood it supports, loathed and fought against the Abraham Accords and “normalization” that Bahrain and the UAE embraced. [Was the Washington Post supposed to know this? Yes.]

An Iranian Connection?

Qatar joined with Iran to fight the Abraham Accords. Some analysts have suggested that the two countries’ joint proxy, Hamas, launched its 10/7 invasion of Israel to disrupt the chance of Saudi Arabia entering the Abraham Accords tent. The Qatar-Iran nexus is reflected in the writings of Annelle Rodriguiz-Sheline, a Fellow of the Arab Center and a Research Fellow for the Middle East at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The Quincy Institute was founded and is run by the Iranian regime advocate Trita Parsi.

Rodriguiz-Shelline is known for her public resignation from the State Department in March 2024: “Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State. Whatever credibility the United States had as an advocate for human rights has almost entirely vanished since the [Gaza] war began.”⁴

Sheline joined with Parsi in a March 2025 Quincy paper, “Saudi-Israel Normalization: Parameters for an Acceptable Deal,” in which they wrote, “Saudi–Israel normalization would, in and of itself, neither transform nor stabilize the Middle East.” The Abraham Accords “sought to organize the region against Iran.” They called for a larger deal that would facilitate “America’s military exit from the region, a Palestinian state, and ending the Israeli occupation.” Precisely, the Iranian prescription for a Persian hegemony in the Middle East.

Conclusion

The foreign infiltration of America’s media, academia, and politics is alarming and must be investigated. Billions of dollars are spent. For half a century, from the days of Sen. J. William Fulbright, Israel’s detractors have shrieked about Israeli influence in the United States, but this author can attest from firsthand experience and liaison with the U.S. Justice Department and Federal Elections Commission that all charges are false and the activities of Jewish organizations and political activists are 100 percent kosher under U.S. laws.

The same cannot be said about the activities of countries like China, Qatar, and Iran. The work of the Justice Department’s Foreign Agent Registration Office must be expanded and toughened.

Irony of ironies, Fulbright left the U.S. Senate and had to register as a foreign agent for Saudi Arabia.

* * *

Notes

https://www.memri.org/tv/sheikha-moza-mother-emir-qatar-israel-spreads-false-narrative-antisemitism-palestinian-honor-men. For more on Sheikha Moza’s activity on U.S. campuses, see https://jcpa.org/article/qatars-role-in-undermining-israels-legitimacy-on-u-s-university-campuses/↩︎
https://arabcenterdc.org/event/a-historic-juncture-israels-destruction-of-gaza-and-the-palestinian-future/ Downloaded on May 29, 2025.↩︎
Justice Department https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6814-Informational-Materials-20241010-101.pdf↩︎
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/27/opinions/gaza-israel-resigning-state-department-sheline/index.html; https://quincyinst.org/research/saudi-israel-normalization-parameters-for-an-acceptable-deal/#h-a-solution-to-the-palestine-conflict ↩︎

Ignore the Left-wing naysayers, Israel is winning this necessary war

Center for Near East Policy Research

June 6, 2025

The EU’s foreign affairs chief, Kaja Kallas, says “Israeli strikes in Gaza go beyond what is necessary to fight Hamas”. Perhaps she should head to Jerusalem and give precise instructions to the IDF on what they should be doing to eliminate the Hamas terrorist regime – assuming that’s what she actually wants. She can tell them how you kill terrorists entwined into the population, hiding in tunnels beneath schools, hospitals and houses, protected by the most comprehensively booby-trapped terrain in the history of warfare, all while minimising harm to civilians.

Of course, like so many other blowhard Western politicians, she doesn’t have a clue. Fortunately the IDF does and has been waging this hugely complex war for 19 months with a combination of fighting prowess and humanitarian restraint that no other army could match. That is the true picture that I have witnessed with my own eyes, unlike the vast array of armchair commentators and rabble-rousers with their lies and distortions intended to break Israel or signal their own non-existent virtues or both.

And Israel has had unparalleled success. They have killed something like 20-25,000 Hamas terrorists, including many senior commanders. The latest of these is Mohammed Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, blown apart in an air strike earlier this month as he was skulking in a tunnel beneath a hospital in Khan Younis. His older brother Yahya, from whom he took over the reins of Hamas, met his maker last October. Shortly before that Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s military commander, saw the same fate.

The list goes on, and many more would have joined it had the IDF not been so determined to avoid killing the hostages and where possible to avoid harm to civilians in line with their scrupulously observed obligations under International Humanitarian Law. Those who have been dispatched have been replaced, though by less experienced and less able terrorists, but I’m not sure how long the list of applicants will be for the Sinwar brothers’ uniquely hazardous job.

Kallas also rejects Israel’s latest efforts to get aid to Gazan civilians while preventing it from falling into the hands of Hamas. While she pontificates from her headquarters in Brussels with its lavish restaurants, Gazans have been enthusiastically queuing up in their thousands to collect food and even camping out overnight.

But Kallas is in good company. Hamas also rejects this aid system and has been threatening Gazans against using it. Nor does the UN like it one little bit, despite the outrageously fake assertion last week that 14,000 babies would die of malnutrition in 48 hours.

Hamas’s position is understandable. It is focused on survival and pretty much its only source of funds now is from hijacking and selling aid at premium prices. But what about Kallas, the UN and even our own Government which also does not support this new initiative?

It is hard to escape the conclusion, with the growing chorus of condemnations against Israel, that these people are terrified Jerusalem will win this war. That’s the last thing they want as it would undermine any leverage they might have in pursuit of the holy grail of a “two state solution”.

Lacking insight, or terrified of being seen to have been wrong all along, they utterly fail to recognise that a two state solution is permanently interred after Hamas hammered the final nail into its coffin on October 7 2023.

Unfortunately for the unholy alliance against its victory, Israel is going to prevail – and not just in Gaza. Prime minister Netanyahu launched a dazzling operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon last year that eliminated its overlord Hassan Nasrallah and took out much of its leadership by using explosive-laden pagers. Meanwhile the IDF shattered much of its military capability, especially the long-range missiles that existed to threaten Israel.

Hezbollah is not finished but its potential to cause harm has been dramatically degraded. It will have difficulty rebuilding as it has lost the vital terrain of Assad’s Syria, again as a direct result of Israeli action.

Iran itself, the mastermind of the jihadist plan to suffocate Israel using region-wide terror proxies, was humiliated by its failure to damage Israel with hundreds of missiles and drones, not to mention an inability to protect Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh who was taken out right next to the president’s official residence in Tehran. Even worse, the Islamic Republic is now badly exposed, following the Israeli Air Force’s evisceration of its Russian-supplied air defences.

The likes of Kallas and her faint-hearted fellow travellers have no power to stand in Israel’s path, but their words and threatened actions certainly encourage Hamas. Apart from the hostages it holds, its only card is the vilification of Israel by the international community and the accompanying weaponisation of legal warfare.

Hamas could end all the bloodshed and the deprivation overnight by laying down its arms and releasing the hostages. If the EU, the UN and those governments so eager to condemn the Jewish state actually wanted to achieve peace, they would support Israel in words and actions, and condemn Hamas at every turn.

Philadelphia’s Network of Hate

Center for Near East Policy Research

June 6, 2025

Executive Summary

Amid the proliferation of antisemitism, anti-Americanism and extremism that disseminated across America after Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis, Philadelphia stands out as a major center of concern.

In this report, Canary Mission uncovers and analyzes the deeper reasons for the anti-Israel fervor that overtook the city.

Read Complete Report

Healing beyond borders: A journey into the Dominican Republic’s US Veterans Village

Center for Near East Policy Research

June 6, 2025

I write this op-ed from Colorado Springs, Colorado, home to Fort Carson, one of the US Army’s largest installations, where nearly 90,000 veterans live – about 17% of residents, almost three times the national average.

On Monday, Americans observed Memorial Day – a day dedicated to honoring US military personnel who gave their lives in service. As Israelis, we recognize the personal and universal cost of conflict, yet few of us glimpse the struggles our American counterparts endure when they return home.

Our recent visit to the Dominican Republic’s US Veterans Village revealed a model of care that carries profound lessons for both Israel and the United States as we confront the hidden wounds of war.

The unseen battle of US veterans

Since 2001, in nearly 25 years of the American War on Terror, more than 2.7 million American service members have deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet back home, the transition to civilian life is often brutal.

According to the US Department of Veterans Affairs, approximately 6,400 US veterans died by suicide in 2022 – about 17.6 every day. Many wait months just for an initial mental-health appointment, only to face a fractured system of care plagued by bureaucracy and delay.

We met a veteran at the village, a project of USA DR Veterans Healthcare, who told us it took him five to six months just to see a psychiatrist. At the village, he received access to every doctor and service he needed in a single day – free of charge. His story reflects a larger truth: the system back home is overwhelmed, but in this village, a comprehensive alternative exists.

Here in Israel, we confront our own legacy of service. Recent figures show that approximately one in five combat veterans in the IDF struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and many more carry undiagnosed emotional trauma. Despite improvements in awareness, our support systems remain reactive – bureaucratic hurdles delay treatment, and cultural stigma still discourages help-seeking. We owe it to our soldiers to go beyond slogans and memorial walls, ensuring they receive holistic care that prevents tragedy before it strikes.

Sanctuary of integrated care

On a sun-drenched stretch of Costambar Beach, the Dominican Republic US Veterans Village stands as a twenty-acre testament to what comprehensive support can achieve. Co-founded by Dr. Gary Deutchman and Fidelio Sanchez, the village offers a thirty-day residential program that merges psychotherapy, acupuncture, neurofeedback, physical and aqua therapy – all in one setting. US Marine veteran Manny Salazar, who started as a patient, now helps lead the therapeutic programs.

Each participant receives a personalized care plan and the constant guidance of a dedicated case manager, eliminating the delays, inconsistencies, and gaps that plague other programs. This approach addresses the full spectrum of trauma – mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual – in a way few systems manage to do.

And the care doesn’t stop with the individual veteran. Families are welcomed into the process and housed in comfortable on-site apartments. Spouses and children are invited to participate in educational workshops, family therapy, and support groups. This acknowledgment – that trauma ripples through families – sets a new standard for veteran rehabilitation.

But the real magic of the village lies beyond clinical treatment. Veterans live, dine, and train together, forging deep bonds that counter the isolation so many feel when they return home. As Salazar explains, “Here, we heal mind, body, and spirit – together, without waiting.”

Outdoor and adventure-based therapies are central to the program. Participants engage in activities like scuba diving, surfing, and equine therapy – all proven methods for addressing PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Research has shown that scuba diving, for instance, can dramatically reduce symptoms of trauma by fostering mindfulness and trust. Horse therapy helps veterans reconnect emotionally and develop non-verbal communication skills, while surfing builds resilience and confidence.

These experiences restore something too often lost in the transition from service to civilian life: purpose. By reconnecting with nature and community, veterans rediscover meaning and momentum.

Today, in discussions with the Israeli embassy in Santo Domingo, plans are underway to launch Hebrew-speaking cohorts by late 2025. Israeli veterans and mental-health professionals will immerse themselves in this model, studying its core principles and adapting them to our cultural context. The hope is that such a model – rooted in community, integration, and action – can be applied to Israeli society, where trauma is also an unspoken epidemic.

Redefining remembrance

This Memorial Day reminded us that honoring the fallen also means caring for the living. The Dominican Republic US Veterans Village is more than a sanctuary; it is a global blueprint for trauma recovery, grounded in compassion, connection, and continuity of care.

As Israelis, we stand to gain not only innovative tools for helping our own veterans, but also a renewed solidarity with those around the world who carry invisible wounds. In doing so, we reaffirm that true remembrance demands more than ceremonies – it requires action, empathy, and the unwavering commitment to heal those who have borne the cost of peace.

For more on programs of the Dominican Republic Veterans Village and potential collaborations, visit drveterans.com.

The writer is a travel photojournalist specializing in wellness tourism and nature conservation, currently on a family emissary mission across North and Central America with Bedein – Agents of Hope.

Witkoff Does It Again—Awards Arab Butchers, Encouraging Continuation of Atrocities

Center for Near East Policy Research

June 5, 2025

Steve Witkoff on the Tucker Carlson Show. (X Screenshot)

President Trump’s point man in the Middle East, fellow real estate mogul buddy Steve Witkoff, has proposed an IDF withdrawal from Gaza and release of over a thousand Arab butchers and accomplices along with some other slightly lesser Jew-killer wannabes in exchange for 18 dead Israeli civilian hostages and 10 living ones.

Geez, what a bargain!

I mean, after all, America itself would certainly accept such a deal with an organization whose charter unabashedly emphasizes that it’s main goal is the eradication of the United States and murder of its own people everywhere…correct?

Well, that’s Hamas and its ilk’s extermination plans vis-a-vis Israel and Jews in a nutshell.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-witkoffs-proposal-for-60-day-gaza-ceasefire-and-hostage-release-deal/amp/

Worse, even after the wanton brutality of Simchat Torah, October 7, 2023, delusional Israelis still don’t have a death penalty for bloodlust lowlifes who take pleasure in such heroics as microwaving Jewish infants and/or beheading them; tying families together and burning them alive; and shooting pregnant Jewish women at point blank range directly in the abdomen when they’re not gang raping them.

There’s an important saying in the Talmud that “being kind to the cruel ends up being cruel to the kind.” Israel specializes in such self destruction….

The latest good news is that Hamas itself has rejected this deal so far. No thanks to Witkoff.
For Hamas and “ordinary” Arabs (who also took part in atrocities) in Gaza who elected it to power two decades ago, Israel simply hasn’t capitulated enough yet.
The plain truth is that any of President Trump and Witkoff’s “deals” which leave a viable reborn nation of the Jewish People, in its millennial ancestral homeland, still standing on the morrow will never be accepted by not only Hamas, but also allegedly “moderate” Pay to Slay Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah/PA….and the vast majority of other supremacist, jihadi spreading Arabs and other Arabized Islamists who still see the entire region of MENA (and beyond) as being merely “purely Arab patrimony,” part of the ever expanding Dar ul-Islam.

Given the above, here’s what needs to be done NOW:

Long overdue…Execute 250 proven Arab butchers (as a start) immediately instead of continuing to feed, educate, grant conjugal visits, pay health care, house, and so forth for. They were armed, caught in their murderous acts, and should have been eliminated in IDF acts of self defense on the spot.

Next, exchange bodies of these genocidal, fanatic maniacs for those of Jewish innocents who were deliberately slaughtered when taken into captivity.

Israeli withdrawal…To where and how much ?

UNSC Resolution 242 explicitly stated that Israel would never return to the suicidal 1949 Auschwitz/armistice lines which made it a blip on a world globe, a mere zipper of a state, 9-15 miles wide.

After the 1967 Six Day War, was started by an illegal (there’s a difference between these things) naval blockade of Israel by Egypt, in cahoots with the Soviet Union, Syria,, Jordan, & other Arab countries as well.

This was also accompanied by the expulsion of the United Nauseating Nations’s useless peacekeeping force from Sinai; Jordanian shelling of the Jewish half of Jerusalem; amassing of a hundred thousand Egyptian troops, tanks, and so forth right up to the ‘49 armistice line, etc.

And when the dust settled after hostilities ended, Israel, via the above mentioned UNSC Resolution 242, was to receive a meaningful territorial compromise in lands where Jewish history was made ever since Abraham arrived in the land from Ur of the Chaldeans (modern Iraq).

Indeed, the very same land where Hebrew Prophets preached; both male and female “Judges” led the 12 Tribes until King Saul was anointed first King of Israel by the Prophet Samuel; David, born in the Judaean town of Bethlehem (as Yehoshua/Jesus of Nazareth would also be born in a thousand years later) was anointed the next King of Israel in Hebron (where the Hebrew patriarchs and most of the matriarchs are buried); where Jacob in Penuel, earlier wrestled with the Angel of G_d in a dream after becoming his better self in the wake of reconciliation with his brother Esau and was thus renamed Israel; Mattithias and his Hasmonean sons, Yehudah, Yohanon, Yonatan, and others fought pagan Syrian Greeks for the independence of Judaea/Israel and the ability to remain free from pagan ways.
All the above named sites are in historical Judaea and Samaria—not the 20th century British imperialist concoction, “West Bank.”

Judaea later fought the conqueror of much of the known world for its freedom and independence a few centuries later; where the towering fortress of Masada stands today overlooking the Dead Sea in the Judaean (not “West Bank”) Desert, etc. and so forth.

Can Arabs make such a corroborated claim by Israel’s surrounding neighbors and ancient historians like this for the land?
“Palestinians”? There were none until the second half of the 20th century C.E….

JEWS did these things in their ancestral homeland—lands which became theirs longer than most other peoples on Earth could make the same claim for where they exist today—with few exceptions, the Chinese or example.

One does not “occupy” one’s millennial ancient ancestral homeland which other foreign invaders conquered by force.

Here’s some very important contemporary Roman historians’s corroboration for the above:

Source: Israel National News
https://search.app/GHPrPPVcc79pfL4g7

And check out the top of the front hardback jacket cover next to see a Roman coin of conquest of the land. Note, it’s NOT an Arabia and certainly NOT a Palaestina Capta one… http://q4j-middle-east.com

Gaza was part of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine and only became severed when Egypt illegally attacked a resurrected Israel in May 1948. Jews, over half of whom in Israel today come from refugee families fleeing Arab and other Muslim lands, had a long history in that land prior to the massive Arab imperial, colonizing, settling jihadi onslaught pouring in from the Arabian Peninsula from the 7th century onwards. The Golan Heights were also part of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine.

Ergo, regardless of what Witkoff concocts, Israel must insist on doing what typically happens when any nation is brutally attacked—especially since, in Hamas and other fellow Islamists’s cases, the enemy seeks total annihilation of both Israel and Jews everywhere:

Take as much territory as necessary to insure, as best as possible, that such atrocities don’t occur again.

This Is NOT like America in Samoa or even in California ; Russia in Eastern Europe, Chechnya and Afghanistan; France in Indochina and North Africa; Great Britain in India, the Falkland Islands, and numerous other acquired foreign lands; Belgium in Africa; Germany in the Sudetenland and most of the rest of Europe; Spain in North Africa and Latin America; Italy in Ethiopia; the Arabs themselves on over 6 million square miles of territory conquered and forcibly Arabized and Islamized from mostly non-Arab peoples, etc., etc., etc. Check this out: ”Settlers”

https://search.app/TcuzKFoowbqaVRT66

Rather, this IS Jews returning to lands they were forcibly removed from after fighting valiantly against one imperial power after another and living, with G_d’s intervention, after millennia of unspeakable suffering, to see the miracle of Zion Reborn.

On a very personal note, I would be blessed to be born on the birthday of the great American leader who helped to make this happen, President Harry S. Truman…May 8, 1948, during the very week of Israel’s proclamation of independence on May 14, 1948. See here for further illumination:

President Trump has done some remarkably wonderful things, especially during his first term in office as far as the Middle East is concerned. The verdict is very much mixed, however, for his second term in this region so far.

Israel was once again recently targeted by a powerful ballistic missile fired at it because the President chose to leave it out of protection in the “deal” he made with the Houthis in Yemen.

How does he know that one of those missiles won’t be loaded with the same poison gas that Arabs have used against Kurds in the past? Certainly a WMD…weapon of mass destruction.

Trump keeps on warning Israel not to do anything about the mad mullahs’s nukes, even though the latter call it “the one bomb Zionist entity.” Guess why?
It’s easy when you live in a country 3,000 miles wide with two vast oceans separating it from most enemies to feel this way.

But how does he say this to a nine to fifteen mile wide Israel, which has already been targeted by thousands of ballistic, cruise, and other missiles, drones, rockets, mortars, incendiary devices, and so forth?

Israel must do what it must do to thrive, not merely survive.

And the American leader would be wise not to keep on potentially endangering perhaps our nation’s most loyal friend and ally anywhere—not only in the Middle East.

Eyewitness to Horror

David Bedein

June 4, 2025

This week, US and Canadian citizens visit a Nova Music Festival exhibit of October 7th, 2023 ,in Toronto, to relive the violent Arab rampage on that dreadful day.

At the exhibit Visitors will see a carefully-crafted mosaic of information, evidence, and emotion.

Witnesses to the Nova pogrom accompany their guests through a path of pain and loss, where hundreds of young Jews were deprived that day of the joy of Simchat Torah, a shocking contrast between light and darkness, good and evil.

The exhibit is surrounded by remains salvaged from the festival grounds—scorched cars, bullet-riddled toilet stalls, and personal belongings all left behind.

Nova survivors of the brutal attack bear witnesses to the horrors of Arab violence.

The exhibit also bears witness to hundreds of Arabs who defiled Jewish women as they killed them

Yet hanging tall and bright is the theme of the exhibit, that “We will dance again”.

Those who visit this Nova exhibit have a special mission- to bring legal closure to those who were murdered that day.

Jews from around the world who see this exhibit may be inspired to see that perpetrators of these crimes will finally be brought to trial in a case of collective genocidal murder, which in Israel is a capital offense.

There had been some doubt as to how Israel legal establishment would be able to gather evidence against the accused . However , investigators who apprehended the Nova killers describe how the perpetrators readily admitted to their acts of murder, which the Palestine Authority paid for after the fact.

While Nazis in a previous generation tried to obfuscated the role they played in mass murder of Jews, Arab killers are more than ready to admit their role in the murder Jews. ,

Demand justice . Ask Israel to take the Nova criminals to court.

Michigan antisemite plotted to massacre kids at Jewish daycare, tried to buy assault weapons to use for ‘God’s wrath’: feds

Center for Near East Policy Research

June 4, 2025

A Michigan antisemite was plotting to massacre kids at a Jewish daycare and tried to illegally buy assault weapons after hurling threats at the preschoolers, federal prosecutors have revealed.

Hassan Chokr, 35, was out on bail when he drove through the parking lot of Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Hills, outside Detroit, and shouted antisemitic slurs and threats as parents dropped off their kids in December 2022, authorities said.

He pleaded guilty to federal gun charges on May 28.

US Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr said Chokr’s attempted gun purchase was part of what authorities believe was a larger plot “to follow through on his menacing threats against parents and preschoolers as they walked into a place of worship.”

Immediately after his antisemitic rant, he drove to a gun shop in his nearby hometown of Dearborn — which is home to the country’s highest portion of Arab Americans — and tried to buy three semiautomatic weapons.

The Michigan man lied on the gun application, stating that he wasn’t convicted of a felony and didn’t have any pending felony charges, according to the Department of Justice.

But Chokr was already convicted in 2017 of felony theft. He also had a pending assault with a dangerous weapon charge.

While awaiting the results of a background check during the firearms purchase, Chokr stated “It ain’t a fair fight out here” and that he was “going to even the score” and “even the playing field real soon brothers, real soon,” according to court documents.

The gun store owner also overheard Chokr say that he intended to use the weapons for “God’s wrath.”

The federal background check detected the felonies, and he was denied the purchase.

The feds showed surveillance images from inside the store where he tried out a Del-Ton AR-15-style assault rifle, a Landor Arms automatic shotgun and a Glock pistol.

Prosecutors previously said Chokr had “posted videos and statements on Instagram where he talks about buying guns.”

One of the posts said “‘Your Jew tactics will only backfire on you, you have no place on this earth, Jew [expletive], Jew mother [expletives]. A storm is coming to wipe you all out of our lives,’” according to prosecutors.

At a court appearance after his arrest, Chokr pulled down his pants and exposed his rear-end to the judge to protest his arrest.

He now faces up to ten years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

Peace First – Then Statehood

Center for Near East Policy Research

June 4, 2025

Led by France, there’s a real chance that several Western countries will recognise the ‘State of Palestine’ in coming weeks.

I understand the frustration that has led to this. For decades, the peace process hasn’t gone anywhere, and the world wants movement. Me, too. I’ve been following this conflict my entire professional life. My PhD identified ways to dismantle the structural obstacles blocking Israeli–Palestinian peace. I want movement, but only if it’s in the right direction. If I thought that recognition of Palestine would help bring peace, I’d be all in. But it won’t. It will do the opposite.

Recognition would be a no-brainer if Palestine was a state. The 1938 Montevideo Convention provides the definition of statehood, and Palestine doesn’t meet it (and never has).

Which means recognition is about messaging: A country recognises Palestine to reward it; punish Israel; and/or signal its virtue.

Is the West rewarding Palestine? The Palestinian Authority (PA) was established in 1994, during the hopeful Oslo years, to develop the mechanics of statehood and prepare its people for peace alongside Israel.

From the moment of its creation, the PA has been dictatorial. Despite billions in aid money, the international community looked the other way as the PA suppressed Palestinian civil rights, including arbitrarily detaining (and sometimes killing) journalists and critics.

Its last election was 19 years ago.

It is riddled with corruption, which inhibits the international investment a viable economy requires.

And it has lost control of numerous Palestinian city centres to armed gangs, not least the entire Gaza Strip to the brutal, Islamist Hamas in 2007.

This is not Israel’s fault. Ironically, it is Israel’s frequent anti-terror raids in the West Bank that are keeping the PA in power. If Israel were to withdraw tomorrow, Hamas would likely seize control, as it did in Gaza. The resultant Palestinian state would be Somalia, not Singapore.

Through schoolbooks, cultural programming and financial rewards, the PA has promoted a culture that extols the virtue of violence to end Israel’s existence (not merely the occupation). Opinion polls, vox pops and spontaneous celebrations of successful terrorist attacks reveal this time and again. Is this what the international community seeks to reward?

Maybe it’s Israel that’s being punished? If Israel was actively preventing Palestinians from achieving statehood, that would make sense. Some of Israel’s policies have been unhelpful, but Israel is not the reason ‘Palestine’ isn’t a state. Israel offered Palestinians statehood or acquiesced to others doing so in 1937, 1947, 2000, 2001, 2008 and 2014. Every time, Palestinian leaders said no or didn’t respond.

Palestinians keep saying no because it’s easier being an internationally supported victim than bearing the responsibilities of statehood. Besides, their people have been indoctrinated to believe compromise is treason. This leaves Palestinian leaders up a tree.

That is why Palestinians – not Israel – have refused to enter final status negotiations since 2014. Should Israel be punished for this?

The current war is horrible. Western governments are frustrated by the lack of an Israeli ‘day after’ plan and are deeply concerned by the suffering. Is that the reason for recognition?

If so, the message the West wants to send it is not the message Palestinians will hear.

After Spain, Ireland and Norway recognised Palestine last year, Hamas spokespeople, Palestinian commentators and al-Jazeera crowed that it was the October 7attacks that brought about that recognition.

If what achieves Western recognition of Palestine is not a commitment to negotiations towards a two-state outcome, but the bestial violence of October 7 and the war it sparked, then recognition will become the final nail in the coffin of those Palestinians supporting non-violent resolution. Is that the West’s goal?

Why do it, then?

The most likely reason is because Western governments want to shake a monkey off their backs. Each Western country contains a very vocal group that has drunk the Palestine Kool-Aid, and won’t stop screaming about it. Recognition is a political attempt to remove Palestine as a distraction. It’s virtue signalling.

But leaders should realise that feeding the crocodile won’t satisfy it. Quite the reverse, in fact. The ‘Free Palestine’ crowd won’t be satisfied with recognition. They’ll pocket it, then keep agitating for ever more punitive policies against Israel. In short, recognition will reward the disruptive, divisive tactics we’ve seen to date, and so breed more.

For decades, the West has promised statehood for Palestinians as the end goal after they establish a democratic, peaceful entity alongside Israel. That the Palestinian entity is neither democratic nor peaceful is a key reason statehood hasn’t been achieved.

Diplomatic recognition is one of the biggest items in the Western bundle of incentives and can only be granted once. The West is about to grant recognition as encouragement for future Palestinian reform. It won’t achieve this, because rewards given before effort almost never work.

Helping attain viable peace should be the motivating principle, not impatience and certainly not domestic political considerations. Earlier this year, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said that a Palestinian state needs a reformed Palestinian Authority. If recognition is to come before statehood, it must be used, at minimum, as a reward for significant (and completed) Palestinian reforms that cultivate peace and viable Palestinian governance.

Anything less tells Palestinians that rejectionism and violence generates Western reward. That’s not the message the West wants to send, but it’s the message Palestinians will hear.

Dr Bren Carlill is the director of special projects at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, and author of The Challenges of Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian Dispute.

Israeli ambassador: The two-state solution is over. We are no longer willing to jeopardise our security

Center for Near East Policy Research

June 2, 2025

Contrary to her combative image, Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, is softly spoken and seems slightly anxious. The night before this interview, she appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, where the host shouted at her about the body count in Gaza. The embassy is wary of a rematch.

So I put her at ease by calling Piers “history’s greatest monster”, causing her to laugh and relax. The problem with coverage of Gaza is that emotions run so high, every discussion ends up feeling like an interrogation – and the Israelis push back with force. What outsiders often forget is that beneath the rhetorical fireworks lies a deep pain.

Speaking at her embassy, flanked by UK and Israeli flags, with a bust of Golda Meir (the fourth prime minister of Israel) watching in the corner, Hotovely tells me “everyone in Israel is traumatised” by the events of Oct 7 2023. On that date, Hamas – which controls Gaza – invaded southern Israel, murdering and kidnapping more than a thousand people.

“We, as Israelis, have been through terror attacks in our coffee shops, on our buses, on our streets, but never in the past did we feel like our houses were not safe.” This is their new “vulnerability: the feeling that you cannot protect your own children”.

But foreign governments – even allies like Britain – are concerned about the safety of Palestinian children too: used as human shields by Hamas, and some killed in Israeli airstrikes.

How do you fight a terror group that rejects all the accepted rules of war?

‘October 7 was a watershed moment’

Hotovely, 46, wears regal purple and leans forward as she speaks, injecting urgency into the conversation. Her parents, Gabriel and Roziko, migrated to Israel from the former USSR and raised Tzipi in Rehovot, an attractive city south of Tel Aviv. Conservative and religious, she studied and practised law before gaining attention as a pundit. In 2009, she was elected to the Knesset – its youngest deputy at the time – as a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, and went on to serve as minister for transport, science, foreign affairs and settlements. She lives with her husband, Or Alon, and their three daughters.

When she was appointed ambassador to London in 2020, some British Jews objected, labelling Hotovely too controversial for such a sensitive role. But perhaps that was the idea. Many states are shifting their diplomatic style from emollience to advocacy. Since October 7th, Hotovely has become a formidable presence in the media and on campuses , vigorously defending her government against accusations she often describes as “a blood libel” – against Jews as well as Israelis.

I begin by asking the mood of her citizens 19 months on from the Hamas pogrom. “I think that October 7th was a watershed moment… all across Israel. No one can say in Israel that he’s the same person after.” She sometimes finds “less sympathy among people around the world” – some governments still live in the mentality of “October 6th” – but Israelis have been shown “that if you have a jihadi, Islamist terrorist group that wants to destroy you on your doorstep, at the end of the day, it’ll end up in a massacre.” Think of it as living next-door to the “Third Reich”.

“Just this morning, we heard about […] a 15-day-old baby who died in a terror attack”: Israeli Ravid Haim, born by emergency C-section after his mother, Tzeela Fez, was shot and killed. Around 58 hostages remain in Hamas’s hands. To recover them, the Israeli army has launched “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” – aiming to seize control of the Gaza Strip, push the population south and cripple the enemy’s military.

“The aims of the war are very clear to Israel,” explains Hotovely, “Hamas shouldn’t exist as a political leadership and with military power after we finish.” Hamas “doesn’t care about human life […] doesn’t care about their own people’s life”.

Hence it has embedded its fighters in a network of tunnels “six floors down […] bigger than the London Tube”, and deliberately located beneath civilian areas. “They wanted to make sure Israel will be blamed” when civilians are killed during Israeli attacks. “We don’t call it collateral damage. We really care about human life. We don’t want anyone who’s innocent to get killed. That’s why we make sure that all Palestinians can move to a safe zone.”

But the UK Government has condemned the civilian impact of “Gideon’s Chariots”. Israel imposed a blockade on humanitarian aid and commercial supplies on March 2 – now lifted – that Foreign Secretary David Lammy called “morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate and counterproductive”; he cancelled talks on a trade deal and summoned Hotovely to the ministry to explain her government’s actions.

Lammy, she says, was wrong: “Israel’s policy from the beginning of the war was to deliver aid to Gaza.” Some “25,000 trucks of aid got into Gaza. This is not a starvation programme, this is actually a flooding Gaza with aid programme […] The reason why it had to stop was because it was being looted only to feed the terrorists” or “to sell the aid that people were supposed to get for free”.

I ask whether this is an example of Israel alienating its friends with such brutal logic. Hamas steals food – that’s bad; anyone would want to stop it. But if Israel cuts off food altogether, isn’t the outcome even worse for innocent civilians?

“If there is lack of food,” Hotovely replies, “I can understand your argument”, but the Israelis calculated that there was enough aid already within the Gaza Strip to pause deliveries while they build a “new mechanism” for distribution, not overseen by the UN. This would be the American-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, now operating in Gaza – accused of being partisan and insufficient, and there have been riots at its deliveries. “That was just the first day,” she corrects, “it’s been improving and I keep on monitoring it as ambassador.”

‘A clash of civilisations’

What about Labour’s other charge – that “Gideon’s Chariots” has driven up the death toll? I cite the case of Dr Alaa al-Najjar, a Palestinian doctor whose home was hit in an Israeli strike, killing nine of her 10 children. “How does that make you feel?”

“I’ll tell you how it makes me feel. It makes me feel how tragic the situation is that Hamas built this infrastructure that is hurting his own children. I have a lot of sympathy to human life. As a Jew, as an Israeli, we value life very much. Unfortunately, our enemies don’t […] I think it’s a clash of civilisations […] I find that Western people find it very hard to believe that on the other side, there are people who are using their own children as human shields,” but they do.

Dr al-Najjar wasn’t using her own children as a shield though, was she? “No, I didn’t say that, but I said Hamas built all its terrible infrastructure within the population, in the schools, in the hospitals… Are we doing our best to make sure that population civilians will be out of harm? Yes, we are. We give them messaging before we strike… Now, think about it. Do you think the UK would have continued living next to a terror organisation that is a threat to your children in Kent? Or in London or in Liverpool? I don’t think so.”

I point out that it isn’t just non-Israelis who are turning against the war. Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister of Israel, and formerly member of Likud, is now at odds with Netanyhu, writing that the conflict is one of “devastation, indiscriminate, limitless, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians.” He has concluded that his country “is committing war crimes”. What does Hotovely say to him?

“It is a lie. Yes, it is. It is a pure lie.” The Israeli Defence Forces “work with all the mechanisms of our international law experts” and the country is “fighting with one hand tied behind our back” because it always defers to lawyers. “Olmert is completely doing a political statement to hurt the government… It’s coming from very political reasons, not to do with what’s happening on the ground.”

So why are the families of hostages – and even a former hostage – protesting against Netanyahu? At a demonstration this week, Keith Siegel, who was once held prisoner by Hamas, declared: “Our families have become the victims of cheap politics at the hands of the prime minister. Instead of ending the war and bringing everyone home, his allies prefer to occupy the Gaza Strip than to save the hostages.”

Hotovely says: “I have sympathy to every hostage family for being so worried about their loved ones, I cannot put myself in their shoes. At the same time, I must say, they need to remember Israel said yes to any framework offered by the Americans” for a ceasefire: “This is the leverage on Hamas, the military pressure together with the American diplomatic pressure, and if Hamas is saying ‘no’ and saying ‘no’ again and again” to hostage release “what else can we do? We can just carry on with the pressure.”

Following our interview, it was reported on Friday that Hamas appears to have rejected a ceasefire deal orchestrated by the Americans and accepted by the Israelis.

Recognition of Palestinian state ‘a reward for terrorism’

Lammy’s condemnation of the embargo was, says Hotovely, “the wrong timing” because it was issued “the same day the [Netanyahu’s] cabinet made the decision to let aid in”; plus the “wrong message because, I’m sure you heard the head of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch, saying: ‘when Hamas is praising you’” – as Hamas praised the UK – “‘then you need to check whether your politics is the right policy’.”

“We are expecting the international community, including the UK Government, to be very vocal about the fact that Hamas is holding our hostages and it must release them.”

Britain and Israel are “fighting mutual threats. I know how much the UK is concerned about Iran’s influence in the region, and you need to remember that this war Israel has been fighting is a proxy war with Iran […] We’ve seen how most of the weapons being found are produced in Iran, how Iran was training the terrorists.”

As for a French-Saudi initiative, scheduled for mid-June, to discuss the recognition of Palestine as an independent state: “This is probably the worst timing ever to go this path […] this is a pure word for terrorism and sends the wrong message to the region […] What did October 7th prove? First of all, unfortunately what we’ve seen is big support among Palestinians towards the massacre.”

One poll, she claims, found 86 per cent of West Bank residents sympathised with the pogrom. Gaza previously voted for Hamas, “so recognition basically means Hamas” and would be a “reward for terrorism”.

I ask if this means the concept of a two-state solution is off the table and she replies in the affirmative. “It was rejected by the Palestinians again and again. Israelis had hope [in it] in the 1990s and were willing to compromise, but […] every time there was some type of negotiation, there was more terrorism […] So Israelis are no longer willing to jeopardise their security any longer.”

This is a critical point – one that many Britons don’t grasp. Governments like Labour talk about the two-state solution as if it were genuinely on the table, but the two sides gave up on it years ago. In that case, what does the Israeli government see as the future of the Palestinian community?

They must be re-educated. “It’s a good lesson to learn from the Second World War,” when Germany and Japan were beaten: fascism “didn’t end in one day, there was a whole process of denazification, a whole process of rebuilding the institutions to a democratic country. The Palestinians, when they were offered to have democratic elections” – in January 2006 – “they ended up with having an even worse dictatorship that doesn’t believe in any human rights.”

She implies that if fresh elections were held again in Gaza, we’d see Hamas victorious again, so she says “we need to build the path not just for peace as a formal peace but a real peace, people to people, like the one we have with the Gulf countries via the Abrahamic Accords”, as negotiated by Donald Trump.

‘We never deny the rights of us to live next to our neighbours – they deny our rights’

Surely there must be some give and take between communities, I suggest? In that case, the Israelis must cease building settlements in the West Bank – 22 of which have just been recognised by Netanyahu.

“There is a myth about settlements I never understood,” says Hotovely, “because when Israel [dismantled its] settlements in Gaza” – when it physically withdrew the strip in 2005 – “we didn’t see anything that has improved in the Palestinian attitude.”

When Palestinians are asked “what is the main problem,” she tells me, they never say the settlements but instead demand “the right of return,” which means “bringing people from all around the Arab world to move into small Israel.” I suggest that, on the contrary, they are protesting against Israelis settling on land that even Israel officially recognises as Palestinian – and Hotovely disagrees.

“Definitely not. I think that it’s clear for Israelis when we’re speaking about Judea and Samaria [better known as the West Bank], and we’re speaking about Jerusalem, we’re speaking about the Golan Heights, we’re speaking about the Jewish historic land.”

In conservative Israeli rhetoric, the term “Judea and Samaria” implies that the West Bank is Israeli as bequeathed by the Bible. “We’re talking about some places that Jewish people have been connected to for thousands of years,” says Hotovely. Yes, I reply, and Palestinians have been connected to them for a very long time, too. “We’re not denying that. That’s what’s nice about our attitude,” she says, “we never deny the rights of us to live next to our neighbours – they deny our rights.”

We turn to the subject of anti-Semitism – on May 21, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, staffers at the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, were shot and murdered outside a Jewish museum. The killer cried “free Palestine.” Can Hotovely see a line between anti-Israeli protest and a rising level of threat against Jews across the world?

“We had very difficult days right in the embassy here. I gave a talk to our embassy staff and we wanted them to feel very open with us about their concerns.” She is grateful for the protection of the British authorities but doesn’t feel “anti-Semitism is under control [… ] Let’s speak about how the propaganda in the streets of London, New York and Berlin can influence a terrorist that is taking a weapon and killing two young, beautiful people […] This is the kind of madness we’re dealing with, something totally irrational, and I think it’s been fuelled by anti-Semitism and the fact that some of those marches that are calling for horrific things against Jews are allowed in Western main cities.”

I bring up Gary Lineker, who infamously shared an anti-Semitic image of a rat – a genuine error, he insisted, for which he subsequently apologised – and wonder, to quote a friend, if we’re seeing the revival of an “oblivious anti-Semitism”: old tropes being used in ignorance of the offence they cause. The winner of Eurovision, for example, has suggested that Israel be banned from next year’s show in Vienna – without a shadow of irony or historical awareness.

“I agree, but I think that it’s not the majority of the people in this country. I think the minority is vocal. And I think when the majority keeps silent about bad things, this is when we get to hear the radicals, raising their voice.”

‘Many Western countries that used to feel safe don’t feel safe anymore’

Anti-Jewish hate “is dangerous to this country, just like it’s dangerous to America and Australia and many other Western countries that used to feel very safe and they don’t feel safe anymore.”

Hotovely cites the success of Israel at Eurovision – top in popular vote, pushed into second by the juries – as a possible expression of “sympathy” for October 7. “I don’t feel like we’re isolated, but I do feel like people forget your own country’s history” – Britain’s fight against Hitler, what we endured and what we had to do to win.

“I was invited to a very beautiful event in Westminster Abbey, celebrating your VE Day, and I was moved by all the historic moments that you remember and cherish from your heroism. But then I’m asking myself why, when Israel stands in fighting a very different version of a very radical ideology, why [the British elite] don’t understand it’s exactly the time to have patience and resilience – to wait for Israel to really conclude the job, until this terror organisation will be defeated and not to urge Israel all the time to end the war, even if the consequences are to let Hamas control the Gaza Strip.”

Watch the full Tzipi Hotovely interview on ‘The Daily T’ podcast. You can also listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts

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Israel Behind the News

Blasts from the past

Qatari PR Show in Washington to Focus on “Israel’s Destruction of Gaza” and “Genocide in Gaza”

The Kangaroo Court Conference in Washington on June 11

ACRPS and the Arab Center Washington, the Megaphones for Propaganda

An Iranian Connection?

Conclusion

Ignore the Left-wing naysayers, Israel is winning this necessary war

Philadelphia’s Network of Hate

Executive Summary

Healing beyond borders: A journey into the Dominican Republic’s US Veterans Village

The unseen battle of US veterans

Sanctuary of integrated care

Redefining remembrance

Witkoff Does It Again—Awards Arab Butchers, Encouraging Continuation of Atrocities

Eyewitness to Horror

Michigan antisemite plotted to massacre kids at Jewish daycare, tried to buy assault weapons to use for ‘God’s wrath’: feds

Peace First – Then Statehood

Dr Bren Carlill is the director of special projects at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, and author of The Challenges of Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian Dispute.

Israeli ambassador: The two-state solution is over. We are no longer willing to jeopardise our security

‘October 7 was a watershed moment’

‘A clash of civilisations’

Recognition of Palestinian state ‘a reward for terrorism’

‘We never deny the rights of us to live next to our neighbours – they deny our rights’

‘Many Western countries that used to feel safe don’t feel safe anymore’

Column from the Director